I don't really think we want major publicity. A community can only absorb so many people at a time, especially when it's a huge vast sprawling mess of material like LW is. Ideally what we would get is a steady stream of low-level publicity in our natural recruiting grounds like Wired - but not headliners.
(One of the worst things to ever happen to Wikipedia, in my belief, was getting headline publicity - as part of the Seigenthaler affair.)
Any suggestions how to get that ideal "steady stream of low-level publicity"? And what do you think about my idea of suggesting a story idea to one of the reporters (I think he tends to write multi-page feature stories)? If he actually took up the suggestion (which I admit, given what Vladimir_M said, is a big if), would that be an overall positive or negative?
(Since nobody said it would be bad etiquette to reveal the names of the magazines, I'll mention that they are Wired and New Yorker, and I was thinking of making the suggestion to the Wired ...
Recently reporters from two major national magazines contacted me in preparation for doing stories on Bitcoin. This reminded me that Wired magazine did a cover story on the Cypherpunks in its second issue. I think the LessWrong community is already larger and more active than Cypherpunks were back then, and potentially more influential, but there hasn't been much publicity on us. I'm tempted to suggest doing a story on LessWrong to one of the reporters. Is this a good idea, or bad?
More generally, do we want more publicity, and if so what's the best way to go about getting it?
ETA: Would it be bad etiquette to reveal the names of these magazines at this point, or even to say as much as I've said?